A FORMER nightclub door steward who inflicted terrible injuries on a three-week-old baby boy in "a moment of madness" was jailed for 18 months today.

Samuel Peebles repeatedly lied in the wake of the attack and at one point the child's mother was detained during a police investigation but was released without charge.

Peebles (32) eventually admitted that he had lost his temper with the crying, colic-stricken child and squeezed his chest. He struck the infant against his leg, leaving a bruise above his own knee cap, and threw him into the corner of a settee.

Peebles had been looking after the baby boy while the child's mother was sleeping at her home in Dumbarton, in West Dunbartonshire, in May last year. The tiny victim suffered a broken leg and fractured ribs in the attack.

A judge told Peebles at the High Court in Edinburgh: "It is difficult to think of a more vulnerable victim than a three-week-old child."

Lord Boyd of Duncansby said: "In a moment of madness you carried out an act of violence on a three week-old child."

The judge rejected a plea by defence lawyers to spare the first offender a jail sentence. Lord Boyd said: "In a moment of frustration you inflicted some very serious injuries."

Peebles, of Lochview, Buchanan Castle Estate, Drymen, in Stirlingshire, had earlier admitted assaulting the boy to his severe injury by seizing hold of him, compressing his chest and rib cage with his hands, striking him against his leg and throwing him onto a sofa.

Peebles had told the child's mother after the attack that he was worried about the baby's leg as it seemed swollen.

Prosecutor Paul Brown told the judge: "The accused offered no possible explanation at that time as to how the boy had hurt his leg."

The woman described the limb as looking "crumpled" and contacted a hospital. Peebles claimed to a doctor that the child's foot and leg had become trapped between his legs. Medical experts concluded that injuries sustained by the child were non-accidental.

The door steward, who had worked at Victoria's nightclub in Glasgow's Sauchiehall Street, later told police that he had walked into a door while he was holding the child. he then gave a later statement claiming that he had fallen while carrying the baby, crushing him with his body weight. But Peebles later revealed that he had lost his temper with the infant and assaulted him.

Defence counsel Lorraine Glancy said: "He lied, initially by omission, in not telling those in authority what he had done and then once the police began to take statements from him, by commission, when he provided to the police a number of accidental explanations for the injuries none of which satisfied the hospital authorities who were firmly of the view, correctly as it transpired, that the injuries in this case were non-accidental," she said.

"He is a young man who up until this terrible incident had not come to the attention of the authorities in anyway," she added.